Shelly Fan

Shelly Xuelai Fan is a neuroscientist-turned-science writer. She completed her PhD in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she developed novel treatments for neurodegeneration. While studying biological brains, she became fascinated with AI and all things biotech. Following graduation, she moved to UCSF to study blood-based factors that rejuvenate aged brains. She is the co-founder of Vantastic Media, a media venture that explores science stories through text and video, and runs the award-winning blog NeuroFantastic.com. Her first book, "Will AI Replace Us?" (Thames & Hudson) will be out April 2019.

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From This Author

Projects that map the billions of connections within entire brains have always had a tinge of grandiosity. Yet to connectomists, these projects aren’t just the key to cracking the brain’s ultimate mysteries. Understanding how...

Elon Musk usually isn’t one for advocating regulation and oversight.
But when it comes to AI, he doesn’t mince words. AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat,” he once proclaimed to some controversy. While that statement...

Neurons are a collective bunch. Although each neuron receives, processes, and passes on information individually, the electrical spikes only make sense when melded together in waves of oscillating activity. Like an orchestra, the notes...

To most of us, zapping neurons with electricity to artificially “incept” memories, sensation, and movement still sounds crazy. But in some brain labs, that technology is beginning to feel old school. As a new...

When it comes to health and wellness, most people have a similar goal: we want to live a healthier, longer, and happier life. Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, medical imaging, and other technological breakthroughs, we’ve...

You hear a lot these days about the sheer transformative power of AI.
There’s pure intelligence: DeepMind’s algorithms readily beat humans at Go and StarCraft, and DeepStack triumphs over humans at no-limit hold’em poker. Often,...

Exosuits don’t generally scream “fashionable” or “svelte.” Take the mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton that allowed a paraplegic man to kick off the World Cup back in 2014. Is it cool? Hell yeah. Is it practical?...

CAR-T may have made its name as the cancer breakthrough of this century, but its roots dig far back to one of humanity’s other terrifying medical nemeses: HIV.
This week, Lengtigen, a biotech company based...

Last week, news broke that a prominent stem cell researcher is making human-monkey chimeras in a secretive lab in China.
The story, first reported by the Spanish newspaper El País, has all the ingredients of...

DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis once pointed to the human brain as a paramount inspiration for building AI with human-like intelligence. He’s not the only one. The meteoric success of deep learning showcases how insights from...

Brain-machine interface enthusiasts often gush about “closing the loop.” It’s for good reason. On the implant level, it means engineering smarter probes that only activate when they detect faulty electrical signals in brain circuits....

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment anti-aging research morphed from quackery to an established science. Some say it’s 1939, when an experiment that restricted calories in rodents bizarrely increased their lifespan. Others argue...

Last week, Elon Musk’s mysterious Neuralink finally revealed their master plan after two years of silence: to build high bandwidth, immune resistant, thread-like brain-machine interfaces that can be robotically implanted into the brain.
In theory,...

The government’s hefty arsenal of surveillance tools just welcomed a powerful new member. Rather than monitoring an external device—a bug or a smartphone—or even the exterior features of your face, the new tech aims...

When it comes to battling cancer, our most powerful weapon is also our most dangerous.
You’ve heard of CAR-T: the cellular immunotherapy extracts a patient’s own immune cells, amps up their tumor-hunting prowess using gene...

There’s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains.
If you, like many scientists, subscribe to this theory,...

An army of free-floating minibrain clones are heading your way!
No, that’s not the premise of a classic sci-fi brain-in-jars blockbuster. Rather, a team at Harvard has figured out a way to “clone” brain organoids,...

Thanks to deep learning, the tricky business of making brain atlases just got a lot easier.
Brain maps are all the rage these days. From rainbow-colored dots that highlight neurons or gene expression across the...

Would you consent to a surveillance system that watches without video and listens without sound?
If your knee-jerk reaction is “no!”, then “huh?” I’m with you. In a new paper in Applied Physics Letters, a...

What if the solution to our health problems is already inside our bodies?
The human body is replete with billions of microbugs thriving on our skin, inside our intestines, and even our private parts. Their...

When Elon Musk and DARPA both hop aboard the cyborg hypetrain, you know brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are about to achieve the impossible.
BMIs, already the stuff of science fiction, facilitate crosstalk between biological wetware with...

“Do we have a chance of ever understanding brain function without brain simulations?” So asked the Human Brain Project (HBP), the brainchild of Henry Markram, in a new paper in the prestigious journal Neuron.
The...

Just a decade ago, the Walk Again Project was a blue sky, Hail Mary moonshot at total neural rehab for those paralyzed.
The project, a collaboration among fearless neuroengineers, has the lofty goal of giving...

Regenerative medicine and stem cells are often uttered within the same breath, for good reason.
In animal models, stem cells have reliably reversed brain damage from Parkinson’s disease, repaired severed spinal cords, or restored damaged...

Many of us struggle with mathematical concepts, yet we’re all equipped with an innate “number sense,” or numerosity. Thanks to a strange group of “number neurons” buried in the visual cortex, human newborns, monkeys,...

When scientists behind the Manhattan Project heard of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their earlier exuberance gradually turned into morose regret. What began as a physics revolution had mutated into a weapon of...

A few years back, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis famously prophesized that AI and neuroscience will positively feed into each other in a “virtuous circle.” If realized, this would fundamentally expand our insight into intelligence, both...

CRISPR just hit another landmark.
Last week, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) confirmed that they have treated two cancer patients using the gene editing darling married with another biomedical wizard, CAR-T. For now, it’s too...

CRISPR may be the premiere gene editing prodigy poised to upend natural genomes and erase inherited diseases. But since its inception, one thing has always stood in the way: accuracy.
Back in 2017, a contentious...

Floating inside a petri dish in a lab at Cambridge University, a single disjointed muscle twitched.
Normally that’s not news. But in this case, the surgically-dissected muscle is controlled by a slice of isolated brain...

Thanks to 18 years of humans continuously working on the International Space Station (ISS), we already have a basic idea of what happens to our Earth-grown bodies in zero gravity. Our hearts morph in...

Dr. George Church, the legendary godfather of synthetic biology, just made another push towards massively editing life’s base code.
Since the inception of gene editing, long before the CRISPR revolution, scientists have struggled with simultaneously...

Two billion years ago, on a geochemically bubbly youth Earth, a simple bacteria engulfed its neighbor. Rather than dissolving into nutrients, against all odds the eaten organism formed a symbiotic partnership with its host...

Dr. Been Kim wants to rip open the black box of deep learning.
A senior researcher at Google Brain, Kim specializes in a sort of AI psychology. Like cognitive psychologists before her, she develops various...

We all have things we’d rather forget. But for over four million people in the US who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that need becomes very real.
Erasing memories has always been the stuff...

The last thing Dr. Li-Huei Tsai expected to help her Alzheimer’s mice was a disco cage.
Three years back, in a strobe of insight, her team decided to stick mice engineered with a genetic predisposition to...

Quantum supremacy sounds like something out of a Marvel movie. But for scientists working at the forefront of quantum computing, the hope—and hype—of this fundamentally different method of processing information is very real. Thanks...

Silicon transistors and the brain don’t mix.
At least not optimally. As scientists and companies are increasingly exploring ways to interface your brain with computers, fashioning new hardware that conforms to and compliments our biological...